Ario is a Cheat: somebody who designs and sells Cheat Codes to Gamerunners.
Rick and Pir are Gamerunners: people who try to win their fortune by playing The Maze, the interactive computer game that is so much more than an ordinary computer game.
MazeCheat is set in a futuristic city scape where acid rain permanently falls.
But despite the dreary surroundings there is a something that enables everybody to escape their everyday life. And that is The Maze, the interactive computer game where you don't just play the game onscreen,you physically enter the world. Once in, you play - run, fight, avoid traps, choose your weapons - as if you are actually there. The hold of the game on everybody's minds means that the company behind it, CRATER, is all-powerful. But CRATER have a game expansion that is sinister to the extreme. In their new game, if you finally manage to beat it, it takes your brain and in particular your memories, to use as material for new games, for new Gamerunners, leaving you an empty shell. Except no one knows that yet.
And when something terrible happens to Pir in The Maze, Ario and Rick need to try to destroy this terrible expansion of the game that kills. But the all-seeing CRATER is also onto them and time is running out . . .

Praise for B.R. Collins:
A writer of real power * Guardian *Praise for The Traitor Game:
A wonderfully gripping book for teenagers . . . Brain food that's well worth feeding to your teenage boys - and stealing from them afterwards * The Times *Praise for A Trick of the Dark:
A multilayered, metaphysical thriller . . . dark, uneasy and extraordinary * Big Issue *Praise for Tyme's End:
From the moment we see Oliver's grandfather in thrall to Jack, watching as the older man pulls the legs and antennae from a beautiful green beetle and places it back in the grass, it's impossible to put the book down * Guardian *

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